Hick's 405: The biggest innings in England in 93 years

In 1988, Vic Marks was part of a Somerset attack that Graeme Hick hammered around Taunton. With the help of team-mates and opponents, our cricket correspondent recalls that famous innings and examines why Hick, who retires this week, never achieved his expected dominance of the international game

I was there. Twenty years on after a momentous sporting event there are usually enough first-hand witnesses around to fill the relevant stadium five times over. But I was bloody there all right - along with about 1500 others - when Graeme Hick scored 405 not out. I have the bowling figures to prove it (50-6-141-1, since you ask).

And I was grumpy. All that guff about being involved, however peripherally, in a little bit of history, was no consolation for another thrashing around Taunton. No one had scored 400 in the County Championship since 1895, when Archie MacLaren had hit 424 not out for Lancashire, also against Somerset at Taunton. All the other quadruple centurions had scored their runs on distant fields: Karachi, Sydney, Poona and Melbourne. Hick was sparking a new era of mammoth scores.

I was grumpy about Taunton; those straight boundaries meant that even a mishit could come to rest in the graveyard at one end or the River Tone at the other. Too often the pitch was over-friendly to batsmen, though curiously the match against Worcestershire on 5, 6, 7 and 8 May 1988 was not one of those occasions.

Three years earlier I had witnessed another momentous - and more pleasurable - innings. On 1 June 1985 Viv Richards had smashed 322 against Warwickshire at Taunton, of course. It was a less pedestrian affair than Hick's, coming from just 258 deliveries. After he had reached his century Richards looked as if he was going to give it away: a hundred would be enough. I never saw Hick in that mood.

But the odd catch was dropped. Captain Norman Gifford brought back the opening bowlers, a challenge that galvanised Richards, and he kept going ferociously. And everyone gasped along the way. Batting with him as he approached his triple century, I grew nervous, just in case I ran him out. Actually we did not do much running - when he was on strike.

That had been a three-day game. Three years later I was grumpy with the Test and County Cricket Board. In their wisdom they were experimenting with four-day cricket. In 1988, six of the 22 matches in the one-division County Championship were of four days' duration rather than three. Unfortunately the game against Worcestershire was one of them. This meant that there was plenty of time for Hick to go on and on and on.

I was grumpy with our captain, Peter Roebuck. He later recalled how Hick's first ball was hit in the air to square leg. Roebuck says that he had been thinking of stationing a fielder there as Hick took guard, but, most unusually for him, he let bygones be bygones. There was no one there as the ball sped away towards the boundary.

And I may have been grumpy because it was Worcestershire. There was a certain frisson in Somerset-Worcestershire matches of that era. Of course this had nothing to do with Hick, who is one of the least offensive men to have picked up a cricket bat. Ian Botham had moved on from Somerset after 1986 when Richards and Joel Garner had been sacked by the club and replaced by Martin Crowe. So Botham went to Worcester. Which always added a little spice to the fixture.

The players went through the usual pre-match routine of poking and prodding the pitch as if that would bring some enlightenment. But even that was a tense affair. Roebuck was not talking to Botham and vice versa. I was talking to both of them, but not simultaneously.

The previous year, in a much hyped, rain-ruined match, Botham - inevitably - scored a hundred on his first return to Taunton's County Ground as a Worcestershire player (Hick b Marks 0, as a point of very necessary information). I had to bowl all day as mysterious injuries and illness afflicted our players. That always seemed to happen against Worcestershire.

Yet all appeared to be going swimmingly on 5 May 1988. There had been the problem of an opening partnership of 78 between Tim Curtis and Gordon Lord. But from 78 for no wicket Worcestershire subsided to 132 for five. The ball was darting around nicely, unless Hick was facing.

Damien D'Oliveira, who was batting at four for Worcestershire, recalls: 'I asked Graeme, "What's it doing?" "Absolutely nothing," he replied. Graham Rose bowled one on off stump, it moved away and I nicked it. "That's the only ball that's done anything," he said. I told him where to go.' Hick, you can be sure, would not have misled poor D'Oliveira on purpose.

Neil Burns, Somerset's keeper, offers the obvious explanation. 'It was like two games going on. The ball was nipping about and people were nicking it in one, but Hick was batting immaculately and hitting everything for four in another.'

When Rose took three wickets in nine balls, including what was presumed to be the vital scalp, that of Botham, Somerset seemed to be in control. No matter that Hick was still in, there were only the non-specialist batsmen at the other end. Unfortunately they were non-specialists of the most dogged type - two bloody-minded Tykes, who refused to budge: Steven Rhodes, now the coach at Worcestershire and Richard Illingworth, now an umpire.

Rhodes batted 274 balls for his 56. 'I just tried to blunt the attack,' he says. 'It was a pleasure to run his runs for him. I played only one shot in anger and it got me out.' In the meantime he had added 265 with Hick.

However, that Hick innings was more remarkable for its unrelenting discipline than its dazzling strokeplay. Unlike the Richards knock, there were not so many gasps along the way - just a few from 288 onwards when two straight sixes off Colin Dredge took him to 300. His colleagues reckoned that the 212 he hit on a turning pitch at Old Trafford - in April! - was a superior effort.

At the close of the first day's play, Hick was 179 not out but, being just 21 years old, there was little chance of fatigue hampering him the following day or, given his dedication, of him getting plastered in celebration at another century. Rhodes remembers: 'Hicky's not a big drinker, but a group of us went for a Chinese meal and he had a pint of lager. Peter Roebuck came in with Graham Rose and joked the booze could make him succumb early next day.'

Not a very funny joke. It took Hick eight hours and 411 balls to reach 300. It was risk-free; it was pragmatic and ruthlessly efficient. He hit me for a six or two over mid-on. He often did that. So a fielder was stationed at long-on and thereafter he was content to take the easiest of easy singles in that direction. I was cutting my losses, acknowledging his dominance and hoping to dismiss the bloke at the other end. A sound plan, pity about the execution.

Hick clocked up 75 runs in each session. Brian Rose, Somerset's current director of cricket, watched from the dressing room. 'I remember Dredgie [over the years the 'Demon of Frome' had some success against Hick with his 'nip-backers'] getting an inside edge which scuttled down to third man. That was the only time I thought we might get him.'

Around the 300 mark, Hick changed gear, opening his shoulders. When he reached that landmark I mentioned - rather uncharitably - that someone had already scored more than 400 at Taunton. It took him only 58 more balls to get there. But Phil Neale, his captain, was not intent upon breaking records for their own sake. MacLaren's record would be intact.

'The game plan was always to get as many as we could as fast as we could,' Neale says. 'We were going to declare earlier, but I delayed it until Graeme reached 300 - he then got to 400 so quickly we still had time to bowl on that second evening. I think he always knew I'd call it a day on 400, but the team objective was always the most important thing.' When he did call it a day, Hick had scored 405 of the 550 runs added while he was at the crease.

David Foot, that wizard of West Country wordsmiths, was there to watch Hick return to the pavilion and has recently recreated the scene. 'He should be drained with traces of elation etching through his weariness. Instead he walks with a brisk step, the face offers not a flicker of emotion as the smallish crowd, belatedly sensing the proximity of cricketing history, converges to applaud. He passes not more than a yard away and there is not the merest evidence of perspiration on his cheeks and forehead. He could be out for a walk along Worcestershire's River Severn.' Your correspondent, I think, looked a little more dishevelled.

It was, I suppose, a great innings, but it was clinical rather than charismatic. As Roebuck wrote in Wisden the following year: 'There was never any sense of awesome personality in this awesome batting... Apart from its proportion it was not a masterpiece.' He added: 'Hick, I believe, will become a major force in Test cricket.' We all thought so. And we were all wrong.

This helps to explain Hick's longevity in the county game, from which he retires this week aged 42. The unfulfilled at international level play on, amassing thousands of first-class runs in county cricket as some form of recompense. The same principle applies to Mark Ramprakash. It may also apply to Marcus Trescothick, whose international career was not so much unfulfilled as incomplete.

There were moments when we thought - and hoped (for he was obviously such a decent man) - that Hick had cracked it. He hit a magnificent first Test century, 178 in Bombay in 1993, but England lost by an innings. His second most favourite Test innings, 141 against South Africa at Centurion, was in a match long since forgotten since it was ruined by torrential rain.

We do remember his 98 not out in Sydney in 1995 when Mike Atherton declared. Atherton has since acknowledged that it was a mistake to declare, but Hick had been dithering horribly as he approached three figures. He might have made his mark in a World Cup final as part of England's best one-day side for two decades. Hick had a fine tournament in Australia in 1992, but was duped by Mushtaq Ahmed's googly in the final, lost to Pakistan.

It is neither a tragedy nor a mystery that Hick, who has scored 136 first-class hundreds and 41,112 runs, had such a mediocre record with England. Rather, his career is a reminder of how difficult it is to succeed at the highest level. Ability alone is not enough. In a recent interview Hick said: 'I never had a cut-throat edge, that's why I fell short... Of course I would have liked to have scored 30 Test hundreds, but I might not be the person I am if I'd done that.'

The implication here, which I do not accept, is that you have to be a ruthless bastard to excel at the highest level. It may help, but here are a few names just to start with as a counter-argument: Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Michael Vaughan, Gary Kirsten... and there must be some Aussie we could throw into the pot.

Hick had the eye; he had the talent; he had the technique; but he was not mentally strong enough to excel at the top. Of course we were blissfully unaware of that at Taunton in 1988 when he seemed so invincible. If we had known, then obviously I would have had to swear at him.